Phenomenal people have outstanding charts that are worthwhile an astrological student’s time. President Barack Hussein Obama the USA’s 44th President and the first Black American President, a spectacular feat since it was a mere fifty years since the Jim Crow laws were abolished by President Lyndon B. Johnson. His chart, a Splash Universalist, temperament type is fitting such a phenomenal feat — the man defintely fits the times.
The Opposition of Awareness
Dr. Marc E. Jones termed the astrological opposition as an aspect of “awareness” because each planet or point was opposite the other and so could view it. The person with an opposition was cognizant of that facet of his personality and used it to spur him to achieve great heights. President Obama’s chart fits that defnition perfectly because he has several oppositions, marked out below each in a different color.
Astrologer Dal Lee in his helpful Dictionary of Astrology³ writes that “oppositions sound worse than they are for they mainly challenge the owner of the horoscope. Many men whose birth charts show afflictions have risen to the top of their professions (Henry Ford outlined here has a Grand Cross) but all that means is that they have to work hard to get there. But as Mr. Lee adds, ” strong or motivated character can meet any chart affliction and conquer it.”
His part of fortune in the tenth house is opposite his Sun in his fourth, suggesting that his father and mother both encouraged his dreams, though he only mentions his father in his book, Dreams from my Father. At 08 Scorpio 44, the Arabian part of dreams and aspirations, suggests Obama in the Hyperion symbols, “that he records all his past experiences, upon which he bases his own world of becoming {his wife’s book btw}”. It gets the keyword of Experience and McClung writes that it the acknowledge of the past that constitutes and is fulfilled in the present.
A Cardinal Opposition
This aspect signifies tension between the two houses involved. For Obama, with his several oppositions between Cancer and Capricorn, suggest while he wanted to work for civil rights — sixth house service and duty– at the same time, he questioned whether that was the right path for him — 12th house champions the desires for a larger and more .
There was already Rev. Martin Luther King, Julian Bond, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Justice Thurgood Marshall and Jesse Jackson, that had made several great strides in the civil rights movement, and he must have wondered, what more could he do the cause?
The answer came to him via his Cosmic Cross, and the point focus at Neptune in the ninth house at Scorpio 08, “the moon shining across a lake.” This symbol channel the obligation of Neptune into his house of higher calling and suggested that his was the ability, to “release outer compulsions upon the world and achieve a more enduring focus” by reaching a “rapport” with his imagination and the country at large.
Still with his Ascendant in the Twelfth House (Morinus System) reminding him the importance of economics and human welfare, never left him, and it was that symbol of Aquarius 19 “Concern” that allowed him to refocus his original desires and reformulate them into something universal epitomized in the symbol of a “Forest Fire quenched.” It is also directly opposite what we have rectified for the ascendant of his successor Pres. Trump at 20 Leo .
The symbol of 19 Aquarius is a regenerative talent that the native has by giving wholly of himself towards a particular goal. This dynamic and Olympic expenditure of self for Obama made him realize that he could soar higher than he thought and reach the pinnacle as he dreamed. In his autobiography, “Dreams of my Father” writes that just putting pen to paper about the dreams his father shared, made him aware of his legacy not surprising as Mars in Virgo gives a person the ability of vivid expression and re-creation.
Moon to Part of Fortune Opposition
Another opposition, President Obama has is the Moon in the Fourth House in Gemini, the native house of Cancer, opposite his Part of Fortune (by orb) against the Midheaven at 28.54 Scorpio, that btw is square it’s own ruler of Mars in Virgo. The variable Moon, the representative of his mother, Stanley Ann Durham, Ph.D., gives him the ability to gather and arrange facts while the Sagittarian Midheaven allows him to place them into perspective and draw conclusions.
While Pres. Obama admitted he wrote “Dreams” while his mother was dying and barely mentions her, his chart, on the other hand, shows that her life of social anthropology impressed him for she was
the dominant figure in my formative years … The values she taught me continue to be my touchstone when it comes to how I go about the world of politics.
—President Obama, Chicago Tribune c. 2007 Campaign Trail
But wait there’s more!
Yes Pres. Obama has two more oppositions in his chart, making him aware and attracted to controversial opinions as he, according to Karen Hamaker-Zondag writes “look at matters from every angle and give judgment on it, so that the two extremes of their personality are now working in tandem.”¹
One of the more interesting oppositions is of Mercury to Jupiter in the Twelfth to Saturn by a translation of light. This one strikes me because much was made of his use of a teleprompter and inability to talk off the cuff — this opposition would make him sparing of speech, a taciturn man, while the Mercury trine to the Midheaven — 29 Scorpio an Indian squaw pleading for the lives of her children with the Keyword of Effectiveness — would make him a fluid and excellent writer as noted above as well.
Dr. Hamaker-Zondag continues that at “the same time the view the reverse side of the problem for proportion, they also view the other side to demolish their opponents opposition.” With three oppositions in work and health care, it is obvious that to Pres. Obama, health care (sixth house) and sexuality (the twelfth house) were to him always going to be the cornerstone of his life’s work just as economics (sixth house) had been his mother’s legacy (eighth house).
She echoes the writing of Marc E. Jones wrote wrote thirty years earlier that an opposition ” is a state of affairs in which two planets, brought to points like east and west, or north and south, stand contrary to each other. Their “contrariety” is not that they cancel each other in any way, since this would violate the principle of nothing from something but rather that they challenge each other to an activity of a broader sort.
“Where there was once a tendency to do nothing, now that is transformed into a great necessity to do something… The opposition aspect strengthens the native’s awareness of a need to act, working together with sensitivity to the difficulties involved in deciding where and when to act.”²
While so many oppositions make him a lightning rod on his chosen endeavors (the Affordable Healthcare Act is forever known as Obamacare even on the government website), conversely, he enjoys that attention and does not consider it a cross to bear.
Footnotes:
- Hamaker-Zondag, Karen M. “Aspects and Personality.” Aspects and Personality, York, Maine: S. Weiser, 1990, pp. 10–11.
- Originally published in Dutch in 1982, W. N. Schors, Inc.
- Jones, Marc Edmund. “How to Learn Astrology”, Stanwood, Washington: Sabian Publishing Society, 1953.
- Lee, Dal. “Dictionary of Astrology,” New York, New York: A Paperback Library, 1969 p. 58.
